Why have I not talked about these yet? Oh yeah, because I don’t particularly like ’em.

Emoji’s are… weird. It’s somewhat similar to how people once started using gifs and other images to convey messages, except emoji’s are more tightly integrated into the text-based messages they relate to. Initially, things were okay. Emoji’s were a good alternative to emoticons instant messengers used to have. And hey, it’s another use for Unicode’s wide character array. Great!

But as time went on we got more and more bullshit added in. Pig snouts, bikinis, all kinds of animals, plants, buildings, obscure icons, traffic signs… What the fuck do we need all that for? To me, a simple “(:” is plenty to convey meaning/feeling/intention. It’s not like we’re all going to compose our messages entirely of emoji and hope people understand what we actually meant, right?

Oh wait, that’s what people are doing already. Well, at least it makes for an interesting case study for linguists. I can imagine it’s a fun challenge to try and tie this in with how hieroglyphs were used back in the day. (They’re probably not similar at all, but who knows, maybe we’ll end up there someday?) I imagine it won’t be long before we got a good portion of the dictionary emoji-fied, considering the list is still being added to.